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When XG Station, the world’s first external graphics for notebooks from ASUS made their first appearance over at CES back in January, it has stirred up huge interests from the media and consumers. This time round, ASUS plans to demo a more finalized version of their XG Station over at the upcoming CeBIT but the feature set remains the same as before. Check out what’s the next step for ASUS in this lucrative notebook market.

When XG Station, the world’s
first external graphics for notebooks from ASUS made their first appearance over
at CES back in January, it has stirred up huge interests from the media and
consumers. This time round, ASUS plans to demo a more finalized version of their
XG Station over at the upcoming CeBIT but the feature set remains the same as
before.

At start, ASUS plans to bundle and sell the EN7900GS graphics card together with
XG1 to avoid any compatibility issues but there are plans for selling XG1 alone
without graphics card at a later date. Currently, Magma Electronics has a
similar offering called
ExpressBox that sells for a hefty US$ 729 but it doesn’t come with features
like USB, audio and LCD display features. Not to worry as we heard that the XG1
will be available at a very competitive and reasonable price.

Although XG1 possess some really neat features but it still has its downsides
like limited bandwidth and requires external display. Since XG1 is linked up to
the notebook through the ExpressCard slot, therefore the graphics card slotted
into the PCIe x16 slot inside the XG1 has a reduced bandwidth from full x16 (4GB/s in each
direction) to just x1 (250MB/s in each direction). Certainly graphics and video
performance will suffer a considerable hit. Also another downside is that XG1
needs to be hooked up to a display monitor since there is no video-in capability
in the current notebooks so you can’t play games on your notebook screen.

XG1 will be entering mass production in April and retail availability in May
timeframe.

What’s Next?

To really make an impact in the market, ASUS will have to solve the two
tricky issues facing XG1 currently. Some good news to cheer about is that ASUS’s
strong R&D has made a major breakthrough recently and alleviate the problems
completely. The next generation XG Station will have full x16 bandwidth, smaller
form factor and is able to output to notebooks for display. ASUS also plans to
adopt the cabled PCI Express specs
for their future XG Station. However, we can’t go into details right now so stay
tuned for more announcements from ASUS in the near future.